Saturday, May 14, 2016

Wrongfully imprisoned former Congressman Rick Renzi from Arizona just filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. As I've covered in seven articles to the right of this post, Renzi was wrongfully convicted because an FBI agent essentially bribed the key witness/alleged victim with a monetary reward by Obama's DOJ to change his testimony and say that Renzi had proposed a land exchange, not the actual people who had proposed it. Renzi did not find this out until after he was convicted and had started serving a three-year prison term. Unfortunately, despite this newfound evidence, the trial court judge wouldn't grant him a retrial, so he is now appealing that decision. Here is the powerful opening to his appeal, which was drafted by some of the top federal attorneys in the country. Last month, famed attorney Sidney Powell joined his team, a former DOJ prosecutor who has written a book about DOJ prosecutorial abuses, Licensed to Lie. She joins his primary attorney over the past few years, Kelly Kramer, who I have personally observed examining witnesses in court and he is outstanding. He defends wrongful white collar prosecutions.

As (then) Chief Judge Kozinski famously observed, “[t]here is an epidemic
of Brady violations abroad in the land. Only judges can put a stop to it.” United
States v. Olsen, 737 F.3d 625, 626 (9th Cir. 2013) (dissenting from denial of
petition for rehearing en banc). In these consolidated appeals, Richard Renzi and
James Sandlin ask this Court to reiterate that prosecutors cannot “[b]etray Brady,”
“give short shrift to Giglio,” or mislead a jury about a key witness’s financial
motives without losing their “ill-gotten conviction[s].” Id. at 633; see also United
States v. Kojayan, 8 F.3d 1315, 1322-23 (9th Cir. 1993) (prosecutors may not
capitalize on concealed evidence with misleading closing arguments).